Medieval Music: The Mystery of Women
Transcript
Date: Thursday, 18 February 2016 - 1:00PM
Location: St. Sepulchre Without Newgate
18 February 2016
Medieval Music:
The Mystery of Women
Professor Christopher Page
I would like to begin far from any place that I have named in these lectures so far, and indeed far
from the Middle Ages. I set you down in the period that historians are now accustomed to call
Late Antiquity. To be precise, we find ourselves in a landscape of ruins in Tunisia, once the great
port of Carthage. A figure walks the streets of the city; dressed in the garb of a philosopher he is
one of the earliest, perhaps the earliest, of the thinkers trying to refine the theology of
Christianity, still a relatively new faith, in the language of Latin. This man is Tertullian and most
of his writings cluster in the decades around 200. His book De anima, composed in 206-7 AD,
contains a striking report. At one point in this characteristically dense treatise on the soul,
Tertullian turns to the recent experience of prophets and visionaries, especially liable to be
women, who have been granted insight into mysteries while in an intense spiritual state. A
woman of Carthage, Tertullian tells us, recently had a visionary experience during the Sunday
service. It seems that the woman in question was often favoured with 'such gifts of revelation';
she conversed with angels, even with Christ himself, during states of ecstasy that came upon
her during communal worship. The material for these visions, Tertullian explains, came directly
from the readings and chants of the Sunday mass:
There is among us today a sister favoured with the gifts of revelation that she experiences
through an ecstasy of the spirit during the Sunday liturgy. She converses with angels,
sometimes even with the Lord; she sees and hears mysteries, reads some peoples' hearts and
applies remedies to those who need them. The material for her visions is supplied as the
scriptures are read, psalms are sung, the homily delivered and prayers offered.
This is the earliest Christian text I know which acknowledges a special kinship between music,
women and spiritual ecstasy. Much of what Tertullian reports must descend from the woman
herself, notably the conversations with Christ, which I take it nobody overheard, or not both
sides of the exchange. She claimed a great deal, in other words, all of which Tertullian seems to
accept and to regard as a very welcome display of the power of the Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, it is
easy to imagine how others might have taken a much more skeptical view. Tertullian's account
reflects a view of women that is in a sense celebratory, acknowledging special gifts of the spirit,
but ecstasy can be dangerously close to the hysteria and the irrationality that men, with patent
injustice, have believed for much of Western history to be essentially female weaknesses.
Women, on this understanding, are prone to abnormally intense experiences of the spirit
because their very gender is a departure from a normative masculinity viewed as deliberative
and rational. Male and intellectual.
I will return to this association between women, music and rapture, for it is one of the most
powerful strains in the medieval perception of what was truly significant about women in their
relationship to music and imagination. Yet any attempt to recuperate the contribution of women
to musical life in the Middle Ages would certainly need a wider reach than the domain of the
spirit. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that some of the materials relating to women's
engagement with secular music are the more remarkable. Let me give you an example as we
advance gradually towards the central middle ages. Once again, I am in story telling mode, as
you will find me often this afternoon. Now we are in the sixth century, in Western France. Night
has fallen, and the noise outside the convent of the Holy Cross in Poitiers has become so loud
that the nuns inside can ignore it no longer. The people of the city, dwellers in the fortified shell
of an old Roman town, are dancing to songs and the music of stringed instruments, presumably
in the outlying fields beyond the walls. Inside the convent is Queen Radegund, the founder of
the house, at prayer with two of her nuns. Suddenly, one of the nuns ceases her devotions, and
blithely announces that she recognises one of the songs she herself composed just at that
moment being sung by the townspeople as they dance. Radegund, who was as surprised as you
may be by that remark, replies that this is 'very well' if it pleased the nun to hear 'the odour of
devotion mixed with the odour of the world' in this way. The nun, ignoring Radegund's irony and
defending herself with a determination, as if to make it all worse, replies that she remembers
hearing two or three of her own songs during the course of the evening.
What were these songs? They were presumably in the common speech of the people, that is to
say in a form of Latin rapidly evolving towards French for which there was, as yet, no dedicated
system of spelling and no name, unless it be lingua romana. Our composer-nun was almost
certainly of aristocratic background, for the nuns around a royal abbess usually were; did it often
happen that women from noble Frankish families composed songs that townsmen and women
might learn? We do not have the texts of the nun's songs, or at least we cannot identify them
among the poems, spelled as Latin, that survive from sixth-century Gaul. We do, however, have
the texts and music of some famous liturgical hymns that Radegund's biographer, Venantius
Fortunatus, wrote to commemorate the reception of the relic of the Holy Cross in her convent.
There may just be a distant echo here of the nun's lost songs, especially if the hymn is treated to
the kind of rhythmic performance I have asked Emily to give:
Pange lingua
What of nuns at their true task, performing chant in the liturgy of mass and hours? Let us
advance two more centuries – now we reach the eighth – where we find the Frankish Mayor of
the Palace, Pippin, writing to Pope Zacharias on precisely that subject. (Pippin was not as
obscure a figure as he sounds, by the way, since he was the father of Charlemagne, and was in
many ways the founder of that great emperor's fortune). Amongst other matters of ecclesiastical
discipline, Pippin asked the pope whether nuns were 'permitted to read the lessons publicly at
Mass or on Holy Saturday and to chant either Alleluia or the Response'. The news that nuns
were chanting the Alleluia or the Response at 'public' services in Frankish nunneries, services
that were open to the local people, probably came as a shock to Pope Zacharias, who replied
with a stern reproach with echoes of St. Paul: 'It is forbidden for women to minister at holy altars
or to presume to perform any of those offices which men are required to discharge'.
We proceed two centuries more for an event that took place in the monastery of St. Gall, south
of Lake Constance, early in the tenth century, which the monks regarded as a miracle. During
the Lenten season, sometime not long before the year 926, a woman named Wiborada arrived
at the monastery to visit her brother Hitto. They belonged to a good Alemannic family and both
of them had a claim upon the hospitality of the monks of St. Gall. Hitto was a priest and a
member of the secular clergy, currently teaching in one of the monastery schools, and Wiborada
had spent many years in seclusion near the monastery of St. Gall. You will notice the contrast:
the man is formally educated, the woman cloistered. One Saturday, Hitto was planning to
celebrate a private mass at one of the side altars in the monastery, but there was nobody skilled
in plainsong to assist him. With this in mind, he admitted to Wiborada that he was 'anxious about
the next day's service, and especially concerning the chant that is called Tract', a soloist's chant,
'because he had no scholar, and no colleague skilled in chant, to help'. Next morning, Wiborada
stood near the altar where Hitto was about to celebrate. The moment for the Tract arrived, and (I
quote):
…without delay, Wiborada began to sing it with as much accomplishment as authority, so that
neither in the order of the verses, nor in the accentuation of the words, nor in the modal
character of the music, did she seem inferior to a priest.
The narrator of this story, Ekkehard I of St. Gall, writes for his fellow monks who live the liturgy
every day, so he has no need to specify the chant that Wiborada sang. The modern reader
therefore misses the very detail that makes Wiborada's performance a 'wonder'. The Tract for
the first Sunday in Lent is Qui habitat, one of the longest and most elaborate compositions in the
entire repertoire of Gregorian chant. There is no reference in the narrative to Wiborada singing
from a book, so she must have learned it by heart; years of listening to Mass and Office had
filled her memory with the plainsongs assigned to the cantor. This may record a moment of
divinely inspired ecstasy, or sudden rapturous outpouring, but the episode also shows a woman
whose mind was better stocked with chant than her brother, who finally snatched at her chance
to break a long-enforced silence. O Lord, open thou my lips!
Two centuries further on – we are now in the twelfth – and we really hit our stride. A woman,
now some eighty years of age, is writing to the clergy of Mainz in Germany to defend her actions
in allowing an excommunicated nobleman to be buried in consecrated ground in her abbey. As a
result of her decision, the house has been placed under an interdict and the nuns compelled to
recite, not to sing, the liturgy. This is what she says in her complaint to the clergy.
…and I heard a voice proceeding from the living light concerning the various kinds of praise that
David speaks of in a psalm: 'Praise him in the sound of the trumpet, praise him on the psaltery
and harp', and so on up to this: 'Let every spirit praise the Lord'…When we ponder these things
carefully, we remember how mankind needed the voice of the living spirit, which Adam lost
through his disobedience; before his transgression, as yet innocent, he spent no little time
joining his voice in company with the voices of angelic praises, voices that the spiritual nature of
angels does encompass, called spirit from that Spirit which is God.
It is a thousand years since we were in Carthage where a woman was sent into a prophetic
ecstasy by chant, hearing divine voices, and we meet something very like it here: '…and I heard
a voice proceeding from the living light'. The writer here is also claiming a good deal for herself,
like her distant predecessor known to Tertullian. Her tone is one of exhortation, almost of
command.
Perhaps you recognize the writer, for in recent years many books and commercial recordings
have made her even more famous now than she was in her own day. It is abbess Hildegard of
Bingen. I have been involved with her music, on and off, for many years, and I remain unshaken
in my conviction that she was one of the most extraordinary creative personalities of the Middle
Ages. Hildegard came from a noble family in northern Germany and died in 1179, leaving behind
many writings and many Latin chants, with a distinct musical voice, which rank as the earliest
known compositions by a woman in the Western tradition.
I would now like you to hear a chant by Hildegard. She composed O ignis spiritus in honour of
her own muse, the Holy Ghost: the Pentecostal tongues of fire which she (and her
contemporaries) believed had descended upon her to teach her the mysteries of the faith. You
can see Hildegard receiving this gift on the first page of the handout, taken from a manuscripts
of her works, and on the next page the beginning of the original notation of the chant you are
about to hear. Beyond that, you have the text and a translation. This is a large and rhapsodic
composition, an ecstatic apostrophe (O fire of the Spirit…O breath of holiness…O fire of love…O
purest fountain). The lines are rich in some of the traditional materials of Christian imagery of the
Middle Ages (the spiritual lorica, or breastplate, for example), the sweet odours of spices from
the Song of Songs, but all compounded with an exuberant energy that is pure Hildegard:
Hildegard of Bingen: O ignis spiritus
That chant is very characteristic of Hildegard in the sense that it would be almost impossible, I
imagine, to make it sound like any part of a liturgical routine. There is something almost
unsettling about the authority and urgency of that very individual musical voice which rises to
contemplate with ecstasy, but also with dread, the face of God. I mean that there is rapture in
the music, certainly, but also what a much later poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, called being 'trod
hard down with a horror of height'. I also mean that it is the musical voice of an autodidact and in
that sense (let me be careful here) of a woman. Hildegard certainly received an education – we
know that she was entrusted to the care of a woman named Jutta – and yet these two females
were not as abundantly fed with the standard mental and spiritual food as the males of their day.
In Hildegard's case, her hunger found nourishment in vision and fervent celebration, not in
conventional forms of exposition or argument. The imagery of the poetry, as you saw a moment
ago, is very dense; certainly it draws upon the bible and biblical commentary, but it is also highly
personal; we do not have to read very far in Hildegard's verse to find the recurrent images in
which the pressure of her imagination finds a measure of release. She is especially fond, for
example, of evoking an aromatic tree, perhaps the cedar of Lebanon, that in her imagination
slowly secreted (or as Hildegard more frankly says, that 'sweatd') a fragrant balm or something
like Othello's 'medicinal gum'. There was an example in the chant we heard just now: terra
viriditatem sudat; I translated that as 'the earth exudes freshness', but it literally means 'the earth
sweats a greenness….'.
There is no doubt that Hildegard, in her letters, plays upon her femininity, complying with the
ancient notion that women are inherently weak in body but may be (in exceptional
circumstances) correspondingly strong in spirit. (There are signs, incidentally, that Hildegard was
indeed prone to some form of pathology, though we remain uncertain what it was: a common
suggestion is chronic migraine). Thus in 1153 we find Hildegard writing to Pope Anastasius
saying that God, 'who is great without a failing, has now touched a poor little dwelling', meaning
of course herself. Hildegard is not the only person of the Middle Ages who is reported to have
learned the inner sense of scripture, or the skill of musical composition, as the apostles at
Pentecost learned all the languages necessary for their ministry when the fire of the Holy Ghost
settled upon them. The difference is that Hildegard claimed it for herself and that we have a
great deal of the results in the form of her various treatises on nature and medicine, her
theological writing and of course her music, which she collected and gave the characteristically
exuberant and un-self-effacing title the Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations. Men
found it easier, not harder, to believe in her exceptional spiritual gifts because she was a woman.
Hildegard had a no wish to conceal any of this. I quote her:
By visionary means I understood the writings of the prophets, of the evangelists, of the saints
and of other sages without any human teaching, and expounded some of them, though I
scarcely had any learning, just as an uneducated woman had taught me. I also composed and
sang chant, with music, in praise of God and the saints without the instruction of any man for I
have never studied either melody or chant.
What was the 'melody or chant' that she composed actually for? It has often been assumed that
Hildegard composed her chants for the liturgy of her house, and perhaps she did; but I have
always been drawn to a passage in the dossier that was prepared, and ready by the year 1233,
to make a case for her canonization. (It was unsuccessful). One of the witnesses consulted for
the document was a certain woman named Hedewigis, who said, and I quote:
the blessed Hildegard was continually on her sickbed through the lash of God, save when she
was illuminated by the Holy Spirit and when she sang the sequence that begins thus, O virga ac
diadema, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit as she walked around the cloister.
So there we have a glimpse, based on an eye-witness report, of Hildegard's music in use; it is
not exactly a performance, indeed it is not really a performance at all, but a private devotion as
she paces around the cloister of her nunnery singing her own chant.
Let us her that distinctive voice again. This is one of Hildegard's hymns to the virgin Mary: O
viridissima virga. Here the biblical image of the Virgin as the rod or virga that shall come out of
the loins of Jesse inspires Hildegard to revel in her imagery of perfumes and aromatic trees:
'When the time came that you flowered in your branches, there was 'Hail, Hail' to you, because
the heat of the sun has exuded from you like the aroma of balm'.
O viridissima virga
Hildegard was in many ways unique, which partly explains the modern interest in her, but there
were other women whom we might almost call hidden Hildegards. Consider, for example, Marie
of Oignies, who died in 1213. Marie spent most of her life, with her husband, serving a leper
hospital near Nivelles, and subsequently lived in a cell attached to the conventual church of
Oignies. The contemporary biography of her, by Jacques de Vitry, gives an extraordinary
account of a song she sang and apparently composed during her last illness: I say 'extraordinary'
for the performance lasted a total of three days. It seems to have comprised a set of antiphonlike songs, with texts in French. Here is an extract from the passage in which Jacques de Vitry
describes it:
Now the promised time was approaching that she had anticipated with many tears, and prayed
for with groans and sighs. Behold! There was suddenly a sound, and 'the voice of the turtle was
heard in our land' [Song of Songs, 2.12], a voice of exultation and of witness as if it were the
sound of one feasting and rejoicing, as if it were God on high. God wiped away every tear from
the eyes of his handmaiden, filling her heart with joy and her lips with music. She began to sing
with a loud and clear voice, and did not cease to praise God for the space of three days and
nights. She gave thanks, and sang the sweetest song about God, the holy angels, the blessed
virgin, other saints, her friends, the Holy Scriptures, weaving it together in a syllable-counting
poetry with sweet music. She did not pause to devise her meaning, nor delay to put it into verse,
but God gave it to her at that very moment as if it had all been written down before. Rejoicing
with a continuous cry she did not labour over her thoughts nor interrupt the song to shape the
music. It seemed to her that one of the Seraphim had spread his wings over her breast, and with
his sweet help and ministrations her song was inspired without any difficulty.
Is this not very reminiscent, in some respects, of what happened at Carthage long before? Here
is the same emphasis upon spontaneous, divinely-inspired and rapturous utterance: 'She did not
pause to devise her meaning… It seemed to her that one of the Seraphim had spread his wings
over her breast'. Here also, as with Hildegard, is the theme of knowledge divinely acquired since
it was not available to a woman, save in pieces, through the normal educational means of school
and university available to men. 'She put forth many subtle things', says Jacques de Vitry, 'that
she had never been formally taught'.
The story of Marie of Oignies and her three-day song is is only one of the various documents
that reveal the women I am calling hidden Hildegards. More striking still, perhaps, was Christina
Mirabilis, or Christina of Sint-Truiden, today in eastern Belgium, who died in 1224. At one stage,
her biographer reports, she lived in trees 'like birds of the air', and while staying with the nuns of
a certain house, not far from Sint Truiden, Christine's body suddenly began to whirl around 'so
that the individual limbs of her body could not be distinguished'. Then Music emanated from her
body as if from a spinning top:
Then a certain wondrous harmony sounded between her throat and her chest, which no mortal
could either understand or imitate with any kind of artifice. Her melody had the flexibility and
modal organization of music alone; the words of the melody, so to speak, if words they may be
called, rang forth but were unintelligible. No breath or vocal sound came through her mouth or
nose meanwhile, but only the harmony of an angelic voice between her chest and her throat.
Another passage in Christine's biography describes her singing while resident in yet another
house of nuns:
While in this same place, Christine attended Matins every night; when everyone else had left
them church, and the doors were locked, she walked on the open space of the church pavement
and sang a chant of such sweetness that it rather seemed an angelic song than human. It was
so wondrous to hear that it eclipsed all musical instruments and all mortal voices, yet it was far
from equal in sweetness to that harmonious and incomparable sound which resonated between
her throat and her breast when her mind was disengaged. This song, I say, was in Latin,
adorned with wondrous musical phrases.
Here a woman's body seems to become an instrument for a music whose effect was evidently
extraordinary, and which the biographer, struggling to describe it, calls 'a harmonious and
incomparable sound which resonated between her throat and her breast when her mind was
disengaged'. If Christine's mind was indeed inactive, and her mouth closed, then there were no
words and no singing in the customary sense. The sound passed beyond mere words, even
perhaps beyond voice, to something else. Christine has become as sonorous as one of the great
ceramic jars inserted high up into the walls of medieval churches and abbeys to catch the sound
of chanting and return a resonance. She has become a vessel, but is so far from being a 'weaker
vessel' that her biographer, who is of course a man, can only gaze in wonder.
I have mentioned some exceptional women, and therefore in a sense I have missed the heart of
my subject. The civilisation of the Middle Ages rested on the backs of women as surely (and you
will forgive the comparison) as it rested on the backs of sheep through the medium of
parchment. Where did all those bishops, abbots and masters of theology take the very first steps
in their education? With a priest, a monk or some other male master? Yes, but the really
foundational work was done earlier than that. A twelfth century count of Arnstein, in Germany,
learned his letters with a nurse; an archbishop of Armagh who died in 1148 was taught in early
childhood by his magister et mater: 'his teacher and his mother'. The work of such women, the
makers of human capital day by day, year by year, remains mostly unrecorded. So here, to sing
for all of them, is Hildegard one last time, hymning in her most rhapsodic manner in honour of
the patron saint of her abbey, St. Rupert. He is here presented as a part of the heavenly
Jerusalem as described in the Book of Revelation; that city, you will recall, is made of gems and
precious stones, one of which is Hildegard's patron: 'For you, O noble Rupert, shimmer in these
like a jewel. You cannot be hidden by human foolishness, just as a mountain cannot be hidden by
a valley'.
O Jerusalem
© Professor Christopher Page, 2016